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Copyright system defenders often trot out the commonly accepted wisdom that copyright does not protect "ideas" and that there's an important "idea/expression" dichotomy, where it's only the specific expression that's protected, not the ideas.

However, the reality is that both individuals and courts seem to have a pretty difficult time distinguishing between the two, and always have.

While perhaps there's some platonic ideal where it's easy to tell the difference between an idea and the expression of that idea, it's much harder in practice.

It's interesting to see the logical pretzels that certain business execs will twist themselves into to defend a poor business model against one that customers enjoy much more.

Take for example, the claim from cable firm Rainbow Media's CEO, Josh Sapan, that free video online somehow "insults" people who pay for cable:

"I do think it's important to be technologically progressive and responsive to what consumers want.

Found and reported a couple of PHP 5.3 bugs yesterday. That isn’t such a surprise; it’s a new release, after all, and we’re currently in the midst of developing code for the first time against 5.3 here at work. One of them is a crasher, but an obscure one reliant on the new-in-5.3 INI_SCANNER_RAW mode in parse_ini_file and a rather odd configuration file, so as these things go, it’s pretty minor, and scottmac has jumped on it very promptly indeed (thanks!).

InternetNews: "Is there a silver lining in the cloud for Linux vendors? This week, two of the largest Linux vendors each announced new initiatives to provide commercial services for cloud customers"

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 rocks. Here are five reasons we love the new Web browser.

We recently wrote about how many different sources Shakespeare used in writing King Lear, some of which he apparently copied verbatim.

However, it seems quite likely that what Shakespeare did with those words created something wholly unique and valuable (at least, it's withstood the tests of time).

What is it with the silly food related trademark battles we keep hearing about lately? First there were Idaho potatoes, then lettuce, and now whisky.

You see, the Scotch Whisky Association takes these things seriously. Already you can't call something Scotch (or Scotch Whisky) unless it was produced at a distillery in Scotland, but now it was trying to expand its control over the word "Glen" as well.

We've all heard the scornful criticism against idealism, as though it were something to be ashamed of, and mocking of the fundamental ideals of Free Software.

I'm not embarrassed to have ideals, I am proud.

In the US, thanks to safe harbor rules in the DMCA and the CDA, courts will often toss out misdirected lawsuits that go after a service provider for the actions of a user.

To be honest, I've always questioned why we need such safe harbors in the first place, since it should just be basic common sense that a service provider shouldn't be liable for the actions of a user.

But, of course, common sense just isn't that common.

HowtoForge: "This tutorial explains how you can replace password-based SSH authentication with key-based authentication which is more secure because only the people that own the key can log in.

In this example, we're using PuTTY as our SSH client on a Windows system."